In August 2002 I was asked to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 at the wedding of my beloved older daughter, Mary. My beloved younger daughter, Alice, asked me twelve years later to write something for her marriage. On June 2, 2014, the day of Alice’s wedding, I read my “something,” which offers respectful argument and continuity to Sonnet 116.
Of this argument, Lawrence Switzky, PhD (Harvard—English) Assoc. Prof., Univ. of Toronto, wrote me in 2014
I adore your gentle, pointed reply to Shakespeare, and I appreciate the gracefulness of your closing couplet against the defensiveness of Shax’s. In fact, I hadn’t ever quite noticed how deliberately overwrought, anxiously rhetorical, Shakespeare is here. Your style strikes me as affirmative and more relaxed, not a preemptive defence but an acknowledgement and a series of reflections and admissions. [Your] ‘breath become light to end beyond wonder’ is gorgeous in meter and metaphor. I like the opening out into mystery at that moment.